Comment by deepakkarki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepakkarki | Hacker News Reader

For those curious, DiscoverDev is a fully static site hosted on Netlify. It's all handcrafted vanilla HTML and CSS. (The first site I've ever developed, zero design experience, so nothing fancy). Zero lines of Javascript as well :)

1. I've written my own crawler+parser which parses selected blogs and publications and then displays new articles to me in a chronological manner in a GUI.

2. I select the articles myself, and tag them.

3. Then a script sees all the selected articles and generates a JSON file.

4. I've written my own static site generator which consumes this JSON and spits out the updated website and RSS.

5. I push the changes to my git repo.

6. Netlify listens to the git repo and updates my build.

7. People see my updated webpage and RSS feed within seconds.

Thanks for taking a look.

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And as a result, the site is fast as if made of magic. Thank you for doing it right.

> The first site I've ever developed, zero design experience, so nothing fancy

Design is good too. It is utilitarian, just at it should be. I'm increasingly convinced that getting "design experience" at some point starts to cause problems. At least if one's getting that experience without getting some extra "common sense" and "be nice to other people" experience.

I feel like it needs to be stated that not all of us engineers have the same brutalistic taste in design.

It's not about brutalism. It's like that "make it, make it good, make it fast" adage for optimization, for design it should be - "make it, make it good (for the job it's supposed to do), then make it pretty". Alas, I see the trend is to start with "make it pretty" and then often not even continue to "make it" part.

"Make it" without "make it pretty" leads to things that are raw and unadorned; French for raw is brut; the design school-of-thought based on rawness (no design is still a design) is called brutalism; you just described it perfectly; thank you and good night.

Hm. Fair enough. I guess I still had in mind the recent "brutalism on web" articles that showed stuff which really had nothing to do with actual brutalism-the-architectural-style.

Anyway, I was only arguing priorities.

Yeah getting it to work and do something seems to be surprisingly low on the priority list for some people!

I don't think there's anything wrong, per se, with the styling as-is on the site. It's clean and it works. That said, a few typographic tweaks (increased font size and spacing between items, introduction of a scale and vertical rhythm, etc.) could improve readability a bit without introducing unnecessary clutter or impacting performance. That's especially true with a monospace typeface.

In any case, there shouldn't be a dichotomy between "make it pretty" (however you want to define "pretty" for a project) and "make it good." If a designer is creating that dichotomy, they're doing something drastically wrong. That's true for any project, IMO.

I like the site and the idea of it, so I took ~15-20 minutes and threw together a simple user style for my own use that keeps to the site's overall aesthetic while adjusting for readability a bit.[0] As the screenshot shows, the changes are mostly just typography tweaks with the biggest change being a dark design (though that's mainly just personal preference). I'd still check the site without the changes, but I do think they help a bit.

0. https://gist.github.com/bluestrike2/59ffb7796a8d48575c28ceb1...

One proposal regarding utilitarian design: As this already uses old school blue links, it would be nice to also have visited links in purple. Like in the olden days :) Makes a collection of links much more useful.

Isn't that the kind of thing that that simply requires not to actively break it? I.e. dropping some CSS should restore that behaviour.

(Assuming it still works. I can't remember when was the last time I saw a site not redefining link styles completely.)

One design bit I would change here is the monospaced fonts. I realize that monospace signals that this is a "coder's" site, but I find it hard to read. I don't even use monospaced fonts when I write code, as I prefer the readability of proportional fonts.

As a quick test, I changed the font to Arial, removed some of the bold and italics, and reduced some of the font sizes. (I like big fonts, but you don't need as large a font size in a proportional font. And there is probably a better font than Arial, it was just the first one that came to mind. )

Much easier on my eyes this way.

Thank you for implementing an RSS feed. It's absurd how many custom cms systems lack RSS.

I love that it's fast!

For folks who want a different font, firefox's, "reader view" is helpful - but doesn't work here. This apparently means something wrong with the site's html etc. https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-ena... In Android firefox, when I force it with

  about:reader?url=https://www.discoverdev.io/

I get Failed to load article from page

This is awesome. Keep up the good work! Also really like that you're going lean on the frontend side. I miss days when sites are fast like this. :)

Awesome work! Is there any chance you would release the list of the blogs and publications you selected?

I still feel it's somewhat slower compared to something like https://forum.dlang.org

Very cool! How are you generating the tags?

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